Do you believe that you must offer a 24/7 customer support service in a small (software) company?

I've seen way too many times a customer emails us a bunch of times, and leaves a bunch of voicemails, one more frustrated than the next.  Just the fact of not being able to reach a live human being can be frustrating enough for somebody to quit a service. That being said, our customer service load is not high enough to warrant a full time employee.  We get by with a 24/7 answering service just to take a message, reassure the customer that they'll receive a prompt call back, and then return the call within 24 hours.

Quality support is absolutely vital for any company. It is even more important for a small company, because most often this is the only way you can compete with industry leaders. Often it's bad support that turns customers away from well-known companies and makes them search for someone else who is willing to spend time and effort and actually talk to them. Customers are gold for any company, but when you are young and small, every single customer becomes a diamond. You don't have the luxury of leaving even one customer without an immediate solution to their problem, because otherwise they will just go to a competitor. Why should they wait? They don't know you or your products yet. They don't know if your company can be trusted. They don't know if your product really deserves waiting for 24 hours and spending their precious time just to receive an answer to a simple question. So, it's all about competition. If you feel that your customer is likely to go to a competitor who does offer immediate support, you have to keep up. If your customers don't expect an immediate answer and it is a normal thing to wait for a reply by e-mail, probably you'll be okay not spending too much time on support... but only for some time. Sooner or later someone will start offering 24/7 support to customers in your industry, and it would better be you.

That's a good question! But let's face it, most small software companies can't afford offering 24/7 customer support. It's just not feasible. I agree with most of what has been shared here: setting expectations is the #1 thing. The other thing I would add is that offering efficient self help resources can help a lot with that. Users don't expect us to be available 24/7, but they still appreciate being able to find the answer to their question quickly! I run a small software company (Saas) and what we've done during the past 12 months was to work hard on improving our self help resources (mostly FAQs and tutorials). In the end, we've reduced incoming support request by almost 50%. That means a lot of users who didn't need 24/7 support to get an answer right away. To get there, we've tested all the knowledge base / FAQ system on the market, and the one we chose was Support Hero (http://www.supporthero.io). The reason for that choice was that Support Hero was the only one focusing on improving self help support resources. The others just allowaed us to have a help center, but we had no idea if it was doing the job. Among many other things, what we liked the most about Support Hero was its "failed searches" feature. It basically tells you what users search for (questions) and whether or not they found the corresponding answers: Based on this, you can improve your existing FAQs to deflect more and more tickets in the future and provide a more efficient self help support. For us, that has been the best way to provide 24/7 top notch support without having to do it ourselves! I hope this helps. PS: you should watch their video, it's pretty well done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOgsodhxV4

By using a self-service engagement tool, like nanorep (disclaimer I work there), you can deflect the redundant queries by providing answers at any time and touchpoint for your customers. Then instead of hiring a full time customer service employee you can have someone manage your account to answer only the most pertinent questions that have escalated to email. I hope this helps!

Absolutely. Everybody knows that growing your business can be tricky. Grow to fast and the back end falls out. Grow to slow and you run out of money. The same can be said about solid customer service. You could sell a ton initially but if people find your customer service is a mess, then you will easily lose returning customers or the most powerful of them all, the mighty "referall". Grow intelligently, even if it's slow at first, and keep your customer service values as high as you can possibly get them.

Understanding customer expectations can help you to increase customer satisfaction. In today’s era the customers are quite demanding, they need real time support. It is necessity of the time to provide 24/7 live chat support through multi- channels like the web, mobile, chat, social,email and phone.Company like http://gizmosupport.com/?utm_source=quora.com&utm_medium=qa&utm_term=customer_support_in_india provide enhance customer experience by solving thousands of queries with 24 x 7 customer support & engagement through http://gizmosupport.com/multi-channel/?utm_source=quora.com&utm_medium=qa&utm_term=customer_support_in_india

Personally I don't think so, but you must manage expectation by immediately sending a notification message saying that you have received the request and mention how long it will take to answer their queries. Using a support tool like http://www.Keeping.com allows you to send that notification right away.